Great article; and look at the luddites, populate and perish misanthropes and assorted greenies go bananas, which incidentally are a great cash crop and would feature strongly in any NW developement.

Australia has about the same land mass as continental USA, the World's most advanced economy and only superpower, yet we have 1/15 of their population.

Either we populate it in a measured way, that is without importing the Islam problem [ http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/police-gas-sydney-protesters-20120915-25yrb.html#ixzz26Vt9koYL ] or the teeming masses of Asia will populate it for us.

Cohenite,

Europeans have known about the Sahara far longer than than they have known about Australia. So why hasn't someone populated it? These maps of Australia from Dr. Chris Watson of the CSIRO show average rainfall and the distribution of fertile soil.

http://www.australianpoet.com/boundless.html

Here is a comparable map from Wikipedia for the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_rainfall_climatology

See the difference? Here is a world map of soil quality from the US Department of Agriculture, ranking soils by performance and resilience.

http://soils.usda.gov/use/worldsoils/mapindex/landqual.html

Australia isn't really a big country. It is a small to medium-sized country around a big desert. Apart from some alluvial areas and old volcanic hotspots, soils tend to be poor because they have not been renewed by glaciation or mountain building. Our agriculture is heavily dependent on added nutrients such as phosphate rock, which may well be in short supply in the future. In 1994, the Australian Academy of Sciences recommended 23 million as a safe upper limit for Australia's population.

So far as Northern Australia is concerned, people in what is now Indonesia knew about it for thousands of years before Captain Cook. If it had been suitable for their sort of agriculture, they would have settled it. Alternatively, their Aboriginal trading partners would have learned agriculture from them, expanded their population, and pushed out the hunter/gatherers. Both these sorts of things happened in Europe after agriculture was developed in the Near East. The main problems relate to poor soil, the long dry season with ferocious evaporation rates, and lack of suitable dam sites because of very flat land. Dams can't just be built anywhere. Perhaps JohnBennetts could elaborate on this.

Here is a link to the Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce report. They did find that some agricultural development might be worthwhile, but nothing like the growthist fantasies(Foodbowl for Asia!). The ABC's Future Tense went to Northern Australia after the report came out and interviewed a number of agricultural scientists for Radio National. They said much the same things as the Taskforce report.

http://www.nalwt.gov.au/files/NLAW.pdf

But don't let the facts get in the way of your ideology.

It is a pity that the article's main assumption: that it would be possible to grow vast amounts of food in Northern Australia has barely been challenged. I assert that the assumption is false.
The land has not been glaciated and there is very little volcanic origin soil. Consequently most of the soils are both poor and thin. Rainfall is low and wildly variable. Much of the continent is flat hence there are very few; in some areas no,places suitable for damming. There are very high evaporation rates. Not only does that affect agricultural prospects directly it also means that impoundments that are shallow would have staggering losses from evaporation.
The Issues paper for 'a sustainable populatuin for Australia' is generally poor in that it ignores the geological and climatological FACTS about most of the North. in particular the section led by H Ridout, the Business leader, is appalling. For example it states over a pretty map of the world ' much of Australia has a rainfall comparable with much of Europe and N America'. Much of Australia is shown in a nice green colour. Presumably showing that there is good agricultural potential. So somewhere a bit north of Mt Isa is as good for agriculture as East Anglia? Moronic. However things get better. The nice green presumably fertile areas include all of Iceland, parts of Greenland, large lumps of Siberia and the Kamchatka peninsula.
The only potentials for agriculture up here in the North are for small areas such as the Gilbert river area.
The article is flawed totally as it is based on false assumptions.

"But don't let the facts get in the way of your ideology."

I don't have an ideology; you obviously do. I read your links; very poetic; the only one with any pretensions to science is the NT one which descends to "sustainability".

Some specifics;

Is anyone seriously suggesting that the NW is not amenable to agriculture on large scale with modern technology applied to such problems as 'difficult' soil?

Evaporation is a furphy; as are dams; if AGW can force witless Green led governments to build Desal plants then they can be built in the NW and supply water on a needs basis with evaporation minimised and the issue of dams made irrelevant.

The pessimism of the nay and doomsayers is unfortunately what dictates policy these days and we are the worse off for it. I'm sure if the same 'sustainable' principles were around when the Snowy was built it would not have got the 'green' light.

Well said Divergence and eyejaw.

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<< So, in a pragmatic world, how do we persuade parents in say Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Congo or Ruwanda to have fewer children? >>

Prompete, it is certainly more difficult than in Australia or China or Iran, but basically by way of education especially for women and girls, access to contraception, and a host of other things that lead to a general improvement in the quality of life.

Sure it is complex. But so is the rest of the story – increasing food supplies, arresting environmental degradation, tackling climate change, etc.

Really, we need to be thinking about a sustainable world, not just how to feed an ever-growing population. And that necessitates us putting as much effort into addressing population stabilisation and then gentle reduction as it does into EVERYTHING else put together!

The trouble is that currently we are just about entirely ignoring the population factor, that is; the demand side of the equation, and putting practically all our efforts into the supply side of the equation. Not only is this wildly unbalanced, but it is actually facilitating the ever-increasing demand and hence blowing out our chances of achieving a sustainable world or of feeding a considerably larger population a few years down the track.

Think about that for a moment. It really is just extraordinarily BAD!!

You could say that most of our efforts in the realms of technological and agricultural advancement are actually taking us BACKWARDS for as long as we don’t earnestly address the population factor!

<< Either we populate it in a measured way… or the teeming masses of Asia will populate it for us. >>

I appreciate your concern, cohenite.

So, how would you have us populate in a measured way, and to what extent?

And what would it achieve as far as alleviating your concerns goes?

Australia has something like half a million people in the northern half of the continent, most of which is on the east coast of north Queensland. If we opened the north right up the maximum, with a network of small dams, a small number of large dams and maximised irrigation projects, we could perhaps double or triple that population and spread it out a bit more evenly across the north.

So how would this aid our national security?

It would still be piffling compared to the 100 million in Java and 300 million in all of Indonesia.

Not only would it do nothing to stop a population influx from the north, but it would if anything make it more likely by making northern Australia look considerably more inviting.